Installing Arch Linux isn't exactly trivial if you happen to be a lucky owner of an ThinkPad X41 laptop. As a rather new machine with a Serial-ATA (SATA) harddrive, no internal CD or DVD drive, and a slightly unusual networking chipset, you'll have to have some patience and time in order to get it “Arched”.

With this guide, we hope to make it easier for you to run your new favorite Linux distribution on your laptop. Please help us improve and keep it updated.

Update: As of June 17th, 2008 remastering the installation CD is no longer needed. The same IBM Thinkpad X41 boots and installs without a hitch with the official, standard ISO discs.

Other information

Some interesting packages for your IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad X41:

acpi

acpid

laptop-mode-tools

xf86-video-intel

thinkpad

tpb

tbctl

The IBM X41 comes with ipw2915 wireless Centrino (A, B and G) module. You use the ipw2200 modules (installable via pacman, several versions available depending on your kernel version). There seems to be some problem with the drivers for both wireless and cabled ethernet, since I've experienced weird behavior from those devices a number of times, both under Debian, Ubuntu and now also Arch Linux. The devices just doesn't respond to certain commands, or simply doesn't work. For example, the wireless device can sometimes not switch mode via the iwconfig command, "operation not supported". A reboot usually fixes these issues. They can be related to having performed a sleep earlier.